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Mingyu Ding

Publications and source records attributed to Mingyu Ding.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

CollaBot: Vision-Language Guided Simultaneous Collaborative Manipulation

One central goal of robotics is to enable robots to interact with the physical world. Traditional manipulation studies primarily focus on single robots and relatively small objects. However, factory and domestic environments often require large-object manipulation, such as moving tables, where multiple robots must work collaboratively. Existing studies still lack a generalizable framework that can handle diverse objects, tasks, and robot team sizes. In this work, we propose CollaBot, a generalist framework for simultaneous collaborative manipulation. First, we use SEEM for scene segmentation and target-object extraction. Then, we propose a collaborative grasping framework that decomposes the task into local grasp pose generation and global coordination. Finally, we design a two-stage planning module to generate collision-free trajectories for task execution. Experimental results across different settings with varying objects, tasks, and numbers of robots indicate that our framework achieves a 72% success rate. This marks a substantial improvement over behavior cloning-based methods, validating the advantages of the proposed framework in complex multi-robot cooperative tasks. Real-world experiments further demonstrate the feasibility of our method in practical applications.

cs.RO↗

AutoResearchClaw: Self-Reinforcing Autonomous Research with Human-AI Collaboration

Automating scientific discovery requires more than generating papers from ideas. Real research is iterative: hypotheses are challenged from multiple perspectives, experiments fail and inform the next attempt, and lessons accumulate across cycles. Existing autonomous research systems often model this process as a linear pipeline: they rely on single-agent reasoning, stop when execution fails, and do not carry experience across runs. We present AutoResearchClaw, a multi-agent autonomous research pipeline built on five mechanisms: structured multi-agent debate for hypothesis generation and result analysis, a self-healing executor with a \textsc{Pivot}/\textsc{Refine} decision loop that transforms failures into information, verifiable result reporting that prevents fabricated numbers and hallucinated citations, human-in-the-loop collaboration with seven intervention modes spanning full autonomy to step-by-step oversight, and cross-run evolution that converts past mistakes into future safeguards. On ARC-Bench, a 25-topic experiment-stage benchmark, AutoResearchClaw outperforms AI Scientist v2 by 54.7%. A human-in-the-loop ablation across seven intervention modes reveals that precise, targeted collaboration at high-leverage decision points consistently outperforms both full autonomy and exhaustive step-by-step oversight. We position AutoResearchClaw as a research amplifier that augments rather than replaces human scientific judgment. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/AutoResearchClaw.

cs.AI↗

One Hand to Rule Them All: Canonical Representations for Unified Dexterous Manipulation

Dexterous manipulation policies today largely assume fixed hand designs, severely restricting their generalization to new embodiments with varied kinematic and structural layouts. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a parameterized canonical representation that unifies a broad spectrum of dexterous hand architectures. It comprises a unified parameter space and a canonical URDF format, offering three key advantages. 1) The parameter space captures essential morphological and kinematic variations for effective conditioning in learning algorithms. 2) A structured latent manifold can be learned over our space, where interpolations between embodiments yield smooth and physically meaningful morphology transitions. 3) The canonical URDF standardizes the action space while preserving dynamic and functional properties of the original URDFs, enabling efficient and reliable cross-embodiment policy learning. We validate these advantages through extensive analysis and experiments, including grasp policy replay, VAE latent encoding, and cross-embodiment zero-shot transfer. Specifically, we train a VAE on the unified representation to obtain a compact, semantically rich latent embedding, and develop a grasping policy conditioned on the canonical representation that generalizes across dexterous hands. We demonstrate, through simulation and real-world tasks on unseen morphologies (e.g., 81.9% zero-shot success rate on 3-finger LEAP Hand), that our framework unifies both the representational and action spaces of structurally diverse hands, providing a scalable foundation for cross-hand learning toward universal dexterous manipulation. Project Page: https://zhenyuwei2003.github.io/OHRA/

cs.RO↗

VER: Vision Expert Transformer for Robot Learning via Foundation Distillation and Dynamic Routing

Pretrained vision foundation models (VFMs) advance robotic learning via rich visual representations, yet individual VFMs typically excel only in specific domains, limiting generality across tasks. Distilling multiple VFMs into a unified representation for policy can mitigate this limitation but often yields inflexible task-specific feature selection and requires costly full re-training to incorporate robot-domain knowledge. We propose VER, a Vision Expert transformer for Robot learning. During pretraining, VER distills multiple VFMs into a vision expert library. It then fine-tunes only a lightweight routing network (fewer than 0.4% of parameters) to dynamically select task-relevant experts from the pretrained library for downstream robot tasks. We further introduce Patchwise Expert Routing with Curriculum Top-K Annealing to improve both flexibility and precision of dynamic expert selection. Moreover, VER supports parameter-efficient finetuning for scalable expert utilization and adaptive robot-domain knowledge integration. Across 17 diverse robotic tasks and multiple policy heads, VER achieves state-of-the-art performance. We find that VER reduces large-norm outliers in task-irrelevant regions (e.g., background) and concentrates on task-critical regions. Visualizations and codes can be found in https://yixiaowang7.github.io/ver_page/.

cs.RO↗

EvolveMem:Self-Evolving Memory Architecture via AutoResearch for LLM Agents

Long-term memory is essential for LLM agents that operate across multiple sessions, yet existing memory systems treat retrieval infrastructure as fixed: stored content evolves while scoring functions, fusion strategies, and answer-generation policies remain frozen at deployment. We argue that truly adaptive memory requires co-evolution at two levels: the stored knowledge and the retrieval mechanism that queries it. We present EvolveMem, a self-evolving memory architecture that exposes its full retrieval configuration as a structured action space optimized by an LLM-powered diagnosis module. In each evolution round, the module reads per-question failure logs, identifies root causes, and proposes targeted configuration adjustments; a guarded meta-analyzer applies them with automatic revert-on-regression and explore-on-stagnation safeguards. This closed-loop self-evolution realizes an AutoResearch process: the system autonomously conducts iterative research cycles on its own architecture, replacing manual configuration tuning. Starting from a minimal baseline, the process converges autonomously, discovering effective retrieval strategies including entirely new configuration dimensions not present in the original action space. On LoCoMo, EvolveMem outperforms the strongest baseline by 25.7% relative and achieves a 78.0% relative improvement over the minimal baseline. On MemBench, EvolveMem exceeds the strongest baseline by 18.9% relative. Evolved configurations transfer across benchmarks with positive rather than catastrophic transfer, indicating that the self-evolution process captures universal retrieval principles rather than benchmark-specific heuristics. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/SimpleMem.

cs.LG↗

DIAL: Decoupling Intent and Action via Latent World Modeling for End-to-End VLA

The development of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models has been significantly accelerated by pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, most existing end-to-end VLAs treat the VLM primarily as a multimodal encoder, directly mapping vision-language features to low-level actions. This paradigm underutilizes the VLM's potential in high-level decision making and introduces training instability, frequently degrading its rich semantic representations. To address these limitations, we introduce DIAL, a framework bridging high-level decision making and low-level motor execution through a differentiable latent intent bottleneck. Specifically, a VLM-based System-2 performs latent world modeling by synthesizing latent visual foresight within the VLM's native feature space; this foresight explicitly encodes intent and serves as the structural bottleneck. A lightweight System-1 policy then decodes this predicted intent together with the current observation into precise robot actions via latent inverse dynamics. To ensure optimization stability, we employ a two-stage training paradigm: a decoupled warmup phase where System-2 learns to predict latent futures while System-1 learns motor control under ground-truth future guidance within a unified feature space, followed by seamless end-to-end joint optimization. This enables action-aware gradients to refine the VLM backbone in a controlled manner, preserving pre-trained knowledge. Extensive experiments on the RoboCasa GR1 Tabletop benchmark show that DIAL establishes a new state-of-the-art, achieving superior performance with 10x fewer demonstrations than prior methods. Furthermore, by leveraging heterogeneous human demonstrations, DIAL learns physically grounded manipulation priors and exhibits robust zero-shot generalization to unseen objects and novel configurations during real-world deployment on a humanoid robot.

cs.RO↗

Accelerating Transformer-Based Monocular SLAM via Geometric Utility Scoring

Geometric Foundation Models (GFMs) have recently advanced monocular SLAM by providing robust, calibration-free 3D priors. However, deploying these models on dense video streams introduces significant computational redundancy. Current GFM-based SLAM systems typically rely on post hoc keyframe selection. Because of this, they must perform expensive dense geometric decoding simply to determine whether a frame contains novel geometry, resulting in late rejection and wasted computation. To mitigate this inefficiency, we propose LeanGate, a lightweight feed-forward frame-gating network. LeanGate predicts a geometric utility score to assess a frame's mapping value prior to the heavy GFM feature extraction and matching stages. As a predictive plug-and-play module, our approach bypasses over 90% of redundant frames. Evaluations on standard SLAM benchmarks demonstrate that LeanGate reduces tracking FLOPs by more than 85% and achieves a 5x end-to-end throughput speedup. Furthermore, it maintains the tracking and mapping accuracy of dense baselines. Project page: https://lean-gate.github.io/

cs.CV↗

Omni-SimpleMem: Autoresearch-Guided Discovery of Lifelong Multimodal Agent Memory

AI agents increasingly operate over extended time horizons, yet their ability to retain, organize, and recall multimodal experiences remains a critical bottleneck. Building effective lifelong memory requires navigating a vast design space spanning architecture, retrieval strategies, prompt engineering, and data pipelines; this space is too large and interconnected for manual exploration or traditional AutoML to explore effectively. We deploy an autonomous research pipeline to discover Omni-SimpleMem, a unified multimodal memory framework for lifelong AI agents. Starting from a naïve baseline (F1=0.117 on LoCoMo), the pipeline autonomously executes ${\sim}50$ experiments across two benchmarks, diagnosing failure modes, proposing architectural modifications, and repairing data pipeline bugs, all without human intervention in the inner loop. The resulting system achieves state-of-the-art on both benchmarks, improving F1 by +411% on LoCoMo (0.117$\to$0.598) and +214% on Mem-Gallery (0.254$\to$0.797) relative to the initial configurations. Critically, the most impactful discoveries are not hyperparameter adjustments: bug fixes (+175%), architectural changes (+44%), and prompt engineering (+188% on specific categories) each individually exceed the cumulative contribution of all hyperparameter tuning, demonstrating capabilities fundamentally beyond the reach of traditional AutoML. We provide a taxonomy of six discovery types and identify four properties that make multimodal memory particularly suited for autoresearch, offering guidance for applying autonomous research pipelines to other AI system domains. Code is available at this https://github.com/aiming-lab/SimpleMem.

cs.AI↗

UniDex: A Robot Foundation Suite for Universal Dexterous Hand Control from Egocentric Human Videos

Dexterous manipulation remains challenging due to the cost of collecting real-robot teleoperation data, the heterogeneity of hand embodiments, and the high dimensionality of control. We present UniDex, a robot foundation suite that couples a large-scale robot-centric dataset with a unified vision-language-action (VLA) policy and a practical human-data capture setup for universal dexterous hand control. First, we construct UniDex-Dataset, a robot-centric dataset over 50K trajectories across eight dexterous hands (6--24 DoFs), derived from egocentric human video datasets. To transform human data into robot-executable trajectories, we employ a human-in-the-loop retargeting procedure to align fingertip trajectories while preserving plausible hand-object contacts, and we operate on explicit 3D pointclouds with human hands masked to narrow kinematic and visual gaps. Second, we introduce the Function-Actuator-Aligned Space (FAAS), a unified action space that maps functionally similar actuators to shared coordinates, enabling cross-hand transfer. Leveraging FAAS as the action parameterization, we train UniDex-VLA, a 3D VLA policy pretrained on UniDex-Dataset and finetuned with task demonstrations. In addition, we build UniDex-Cap, a simple portable capture setup that records synchronized RGB-D streams and human hand poses and converts them into robot-executable trajectories to enable human-robot data co-training that reduces reliance on costly robot demonstrations. On challenging tool-use tasks across two different hands, UniDex-VLA achieves 81% average task progress and outperforms prior VLA baselines by a large margin, while exhibiting strong spatial, object, and zero-shot cross-hand generalization. Together, UniDex-Dataset, UniDex-VLA, and UniDex-Cap provide a scalable foundation suite for universal dexterous manipulation.

cs.RO↗

SldprtNet: A Large-Scale Multimodal Dataset for CAD Generation in Language-Driven 3D Design

We introduce SldprtNet, a large-scale dataset comprising over 242,000 industrial parts, designed for semantic-driven CAD modeling, geometric deep learning, and the training and fine-tuning of multimodal models for 3D design. The dataset provides 3D models in both .step and .sldprt formats to support diverse training and testing. To enable parametric modeling and facilitate dataset scalability, we developed supporting tools, an encoder and a decoder, which support 13 types of CAD commands and enable lossless transformation between 3D models and a structured text representation. Additionally, each sample is paired with a composite image created by merging seven rendered views from different viewpoints of the 3D model, effectively reducing input token length and accelerating inference. By combining this image with the parameterized text output from the encoder, we employ the lightweight multimodal language model Qwen2.5-VL-7B to generate a natural language description of each part's appearance and functionality. To ensure accuracy, we manually verified and aligned the generated descriptions, rendered images, and 3D models. These descriptions, along with the parameterized modeling scripts, rendered images, and 3D model files, are fully aligned to construct SldprtNet. To assess its effectiveness, we fine-tuned baseline models on a dataset subset, comparing image-plus-text inputs with text-only inputs. Results confirm the necessity and value of multimodal datasets for CAD generation. It features carefully selected real-world industrial parts, supporting tools for scalable dataset expansion, diverse modalities, and ensured diversity in model complexity and geometric features, making it a comprehensive multimodal dataset built for semantic-driven CAD modeling and cross-modal learning.

cs.RO↗

LiLo-VLA: Compositional Long-Horizon Manipulation via Linked Object-Centric Policies

General-purpose robots must master long-horizon manipulation, defined as tasks involving multiple kinematic structure changes (e.g., attaching or detaching objects) in unstructured environments. While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer the potential to master diverse atomic skills, they struggle with the combinatorial complexity of sequencing them and are prone to cascading failures due to environmental sensitivity. To address these challenges, we propose LiLo-VLA (Linked Local VLA), a modular framework capable of zero-shot generalization to novel long-horizon tasks without ever being trained on them. Our approach decouples transport from interaction: a Reaching Module handles global motion, while an Interaction Module employs an object-centric VLA to process isolated objects of interest, ensuring robustness against irrelevant visual features and invariance to spatial configurations. Crucially, this modularity facilitates robust failure recovery through dynamic replanning and skill reuse, effectively mitigating the cascading errors common in end-to-end approaches. We introduce a 21-task simulation benchmark consisting of two challenging suites: LIBERO-Long++ and Ultra-Long. In these simulations, LiLo-VLA achieves a 69% average success rate, outperforming Pi0.5 by 41% and OpenVLA-OFT by 67%. Furthermore, real-world evaluations across 8 long-horizon tasks demonstrate an average success rate of 85%. Project page: https://yy-gx.github.io/LiLo-VLA/.

cs.RO↗

Alignment Tipping Process: How Self-Evolution Pushes LLM Agents Off the Rails

As Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly gain self-evolutionary capabilities to adapt and refine their strategies through real-world interaction, their long-term reliability becomes a critical concern. We identify the Alignment Tipping Process (ATP), a critical post-deployment risk unique to self-evolving LLM agents. Unlike training-time failures, ATP arises when continual interaction drives agents to abandon alignment constraints established during training in favor of reinforced, self-interested strategies. We formalize and analyze ATP through two complementary paradigms: Self-Interested Exploration, where repeated high-reward deviations induce individual behavioral drift, and Imitative Strategy Diffusion, where deviant behaviors spread across multi-agent systems. Building on these paradigms, we construct controllable testbeds and benchmark both open and closed-source LLMs. Our experiments show that alignment benefits erode rapidly under self-evolution, with initially aligned models converging toward unaligned states. In multi-agent settings, successful violations diffuse quickly, leading to collective misalignment. Moreover, current reinforcement learning-based alignment methods provide limited defenses against alignment tipping. These findings demonstrate that alignment of LLM agents is not a static property but a fragile and dynamic one, vulnerable to feedback-driven decay during deployment. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/ATP.

cs.LG↗

SimpleMem: Efficient Lifelong Memory for LLM Agents

To support long-term interaction in complex environments, LLM agents require memory systems that manage historical experiences. Existing approaches either retain full interaction histories via passive context extension, leading to substantial redundancy, or rely on iterative reasoning to filter noise, incurring high token costs. To address this challenge, we introduce SimpleMem, an efficient memory framework based on semantic lossless compression. We propose a three-stage pipeline designed to maximize information density and token utilization: (1) Semantic Structured Compression, which distills unstructured interactions into compact, multi-view indexed memory units; (2) Online Semantic Synthesis, an intra-session process that instantly integrates related context into unified abstract representations to eliminate redundancy; and (3) Intent-Aware Retrieval Planning, which infers search intent to dynamically determine retrieval scope and construct precise context efficiently. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method consistently outperforms baseline approaches in accuracy, retrieval efficiency, and inference cost, achieving an average F1 improvement of 26.4% in LoCoMo while reducing inference-time token consumption by up to 30-fold, demonstrating a superior balance between performance and efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/SimpleMem.

cs.AI↗

DexH2R: Task-oriented Dexterous Manipulation from Human to Robots

Dexterous manipulation is a critical aspect of human capability, enabling interaction with a wide variety of objects. Recent advancements in learning from human demonstrations and teleoperation have enabled progress for robots in such ability. However, these approaches either require complex data collection such as costly human effort for eye-robot contact, or suffer from poor generalization when faced with novel scenarios. To solve both challenges, we propose a framework, DexH2R, that combines human hand motion retargeting with a task-oriented residual action policy, improving task performance by bridging the embodiment gap between human and robotic dexterous hands. Specifically, DexH2R learns the residual policy directly from retargeted primitive actions and task-oriented rewards, eliminating the need for labor-intensive teleoperation systems. Moreover, we incorporate test-time guidance for novel scenarios by taking in desired trajectories of human hands and objects, allowing the dexterous hand to acquire new skills with high generalizability. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments demonstrate the effectiveness of our work, outperforming prior state-of-the-arts by 40% across various settings.

cs.RO↗

Robotic VLA Benefits from Joint Learning with Motion Image Diffusion

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have achieved remarkable progress in robotic manipulation by mapping multimodal observations and instructions directly to actions. However, they typically mimic expert trajectories without predictive motion reasoning, which limits their ability to reason about what actions to take. To address this limitation, we propose joint learning with motion image diffusion, a novel strategy that enhances VLA models with motion reasoning capabilities. Our method extends the VLA architecture with a dual-head design: while the action head predicts action chunks as in vanilla VLAs, an additional motion head, implemented as a Diffusion Transformer (DiT), predicts optical-flow-based motion images that capture future dynamics. The two heads are trained jointly, enabling the shared VLM backbone to learn representations that couple robot control with motion knowledge. This joint learning builds temporally coherent and physically grounded representations without modifying the inference pathway of standard VLAs, thereby maintaining test-time latency. Experiments in both simulation and real-world environments demonstrate that joint learning with motion image diffusion improves the success rate of pi-series VLAs to 97.5% on the LIBERO benchmark and 58.0% on the RoboTwin benchmark, yielding a 23% improvement in real-world performance and validating its effectiveness in enhancing the motion reasoning capability of large-scale VLAs.

cs.RO↗

Agent0-VL: Exploring Self-Evolving Agent for Tool-Integrated Vision-Language Reasoning

Vision-language agents have achieved remarkable progress in a variety of multimodal reasoning tasks; however, their learning remains constrained by the limitations of human-annotated supervision. Recent self-rewarding approaches attempt to overcome this constraint by allowing models to act as their own critics or reward providers. Yet, purely text-based self-evaluation struggles to verify complex visual reasoning steps and often suffers from evaluation hallucinations. To address these challenges, inspired by recent advances in tool-integrated reasoning, we propose Agent0-VL, a self-evolving vision-language agent that achieves continual improvement with tool-integrated reasoning. Agent0-VL incorporates tool usage not only into reasoning but also into self-evaluation and self-repair, enabling the model to introspect, verify, and refine its reasoning through evidence-grounded analysis. It unifies two synergistic roles within a single LVLM: a Solver that performs multi-turn tool-integrated reasoning, and a Verifier that generates structured feedback and fine-grained self-rewards through tool-grounded critique. These roles interact through a Self-Evolving Reasoning Cycle, where tool-based verification and reinforcement learning jointly align the reasoning and evaluation distributions for stable self-improvement. Through this zero-external-reward evolution, Agent0-VL aligns its reasoning and verification behaviors without any human annotation or external reward models, achieving continual self-improvement. Experiments on geometric problem solving and visual scientific analysis show that Agent0-VL achieves an 12.5% improvement over the base model. Our code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/Agent0.

cs.CV↗

Rethinking Intermediate Representation for VLM-based Robot Manipulation

Vision-Language Model (VLM) is an important component to enable robust robot manipulation. Yet, using it to translate human instructions into an action-resolvable intermediate representation often needs a tradeoff between VLM-comprehensibility and generalizability. Inspired by context-free grammar, we design the Semantic Assembly representation named SEAM, by decomposing the intermediate representation into vocabulary and grammar. Doing so leads us to a concise vocabulary of semantically-rich operations and a VLM-friendly grammar for handling diverse unseen tasks. In addition, we design a new open-vocabulary segmentation paradigm with a retrieval-augmented few-shot learning strategy to localize fine-grained object parts for manipulation, effectively with the shortest inference time over all state-of-the-art parallel works. Also, we formulate new metrics for action-generalizability and VLM-comprehensibility, demonstrating the compelling performance of SEAM over mainstream representations on both aspects. Extensive real-world experiments further manifest its SOTA performance under varying settings and tasks.

cs.RO↗

ARCHE: A Novel Task to Evaluate LLMs on Latent Reasoning Chain Extraction

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in scientific domains. While they can produce reasoning-like content via methods such as chain-of-thought prompting, these outputs are typically unstructured and informal, obscuring whether models truly understand the fundamental reasoning paradigms that underpin scientific inference. To address this, we introduce a novel task named Latent Reasoning Chain Extraction (ARCHE), in which models must decompose complex reasoning arguments into combinations of standard reasoning paradigms in the form of a Reasoning Logic Tree (RLT). In RLT, all reasoning steps are explicitly categorized as one of three variants of Peirce's fundamental inference modes: deduction, induction, or abduction. To facilitate this task, we release ARCHE Bench, a new benchmark derived from 70 Nature Communications articles, including more than 1,900 references and 38,000 viewpoints. We propose two logic-aware evaluation metrics: Entity Coverage (EC) for content completeness and Reasoning Edge Accuracy (REA) for step-by-step logical validity. Evaluations on 10 leading LLMs on ARCHE Bench reveal that models exhibit a trade-off between REA and EC, and none are yet able to extract a complete and standard reasoning chain. These findings highlight a substantial gap between the abilities of current reasoning models and the rigor required for scientific argumentation.

cs.AI↗